The road to 200 weeks

The Mackerel service officially launched on September 17th of 2014 and has continued to release new features every week since.

For the Mackerel team, every Tuesday and Thursday are regular release days dedicated to working in some way or another in preparation for that week’s main release. And on every Monday (previously Friday), we publish the content of that week. We prefer to limit the content that is publicized to new features that provide new value to users, and don’t usually include bug fixes and minor modifications. In other words, a new feature of some kind is released every week without fail.

Strictly speaking, the term "weekly" excludes long-term periods of national holiday vacation, such as Golden Week and the New Year's holiday, so "every business week" may be more accurate.

At the time of Mackerel’s launch in September of 2014, the service only had minimal features. For us, starting out as a small product, we believed that it was our mission to deliver new features to users as quickly as possible. And as a result of continuing to do so, we reached 100 consecutive weekly releases in June of 2016.

Comments from people involved

Originally, the idea behind weekly releases started as a lighthearted way to gain momentum during the startup period, but I’m surprised to see that it’s continued for four years now. If you think about it, Mackerel has come a long way!

Even before Mackerel, one of Hatena's strong points has always been its speed of service development. Likewise, I think that Mackerel has met those expectations with its weekly feature release. I hope that Mackerel continues to meet the expectations of users and that its service can grow by not only focusing on speed, but also by taking on more challenging developments in the future.

I’ve been involved with Mackerel since the beginning of its official release and have been engaged in development as a product owner / manager for a long time, and I am deeply impressed by our achievement of reaching 200 consecutive weekly releases. As a team, we are determined to continue to keep up with the evolution of infrastructure technology around the world, to contribute to service development and operation processes, and provide services that will aid in business growth by continuing to develop new features that can “provide new experiences" as stated in Hatena’s mission statement.

Thank you so much for the comments everyone!

Also, here are a few pictures of the commemorative cakes that were made to celebrate at both the Kyoto and Tokyo office parties last week.

The future of Mackerel

To celebrate last week’s achievement of reaching 200 consecutive releases, we redesigned the Mackerel top page (https://mackerel.io).

This is also to show the development team’s determination to deliver "A new Mackerel for tomorrow".

Mackerel’s development roadmap, which we previously introduced at Meet-up, marked some big updates for the future such as "anomaly detection" and "container support". Now, development for these new features has taken on a new significance for the team.

Throughout the last 200 weeks, the development team has steadily released features that the original product owner had pictured for the service at its launch in September 2014. Now we’re working on the development of new features. These features were not a part of the initial plan, but will make up the feature group of the next generation. Now that we’ve finally finished developing the feature group that the founding product owner had imagined, we’ll be working on a new development roadmap that will lead the next generation of Mackerel.

From here on, the development team will focus on developing these next generation features to further push Mackerel forward.

Reaching an achievement of 200 consecutive weekly releases, we believe that Mackerel has finally finished its first stage of development, which, at the time of it’s launch in September 2014, our goal was to grow the small service as quickly as possible. Now, In order to deliver a new Mackerel to users, we believe that the next step is to take a break from our "Weekly Feature Release", and to focus all of our team’s effort on developing the next big feature.

Our regular release days will continue every Tuesday and Thursday and we will continue to make announcements when new features are released, however the pace at which releases are made may slow down a bit from now on.

We welcome your requests, appreciate your support, and promise to continue putting our full efforts into building the new Mackerel.